Featured Poem

• Two Bees

  Erinn Batykefer

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  Once our mother pinned gold bumblebees
  into the ruched hives of our bodices
  and whispered to us: physics says the bumblebee
  should not be able to fly, but it does,

  and when we waded through the orchard’s
  fallen-apple mush and the sugar-crazed bees
  fanned their wings on our ankles,
  we were fascinated; we did not shriek

  or run. Years later, I found my pin and heard again,
  in my sister’s missing voice, the story of a bee’s
  impossible flight—its ungainly thorax and abdomen
  somehow held aloft on frantic wings—

  and saw how the physicists got it wrong: they only
  measured half the bee. Flight is like a limb unreeled
  over clover and vetch, each lone bumblebee
  a fragment of the white box humming in a field.

  In the orchard, once, we hovered in white
  bee-pinned dresses, halved, one thing in two:
  my cruel brain like a stinger, and in her chest our heart.
  With what I’m made of, I should not love. But I do.

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